White Papers Presented at the CEMDA/ITDP International Seminar: Toward the Reform of Transportation and Air Quality Planning—Mexico City

This paper discusses the role and construction of a sense of inevitability in the forwarding of large infrastructure and development projects. It suggests that the growth of the project’s inevitability- its emergence from being one contested notion amoung others to being a bound-to-happen solution that overwhelms the space of alternatives- is one of the most valuable achievements for project proponents, and that undermining it, the the crux of opponents’ efforts.

Travel was free on the Highway for the first months, despite the fact that tolls will be used to pay for the road’s construction. This was to ramp up the fully automated tolling system, but was also supposed to serve as a “marketing device.” The free opening was an unusual move, however, as international experience has shown that drivers resent paying for something once they have used it for free.

Without tolls, traffic was a brisk 50, 000 vehicles a day ? many times the projected volumes, according to a Highway Company announcement. Once tolling began in January, traffic dropped to 16,000.

Radio ads began to encourage use of the Highway, touting it as “the calmest there is.” Especially marked was the drop in volume of trucks over four tons, which pay $4 with a subscription, and $5 without. Many companies hauling freight felt that the tolls on their fleet would cut too severely into their profits, and told drivers that they personally, not the company, would be liable for toll charges.

Time will tell whether this initial refusal to use the road is a ploy of trucking companies to get a reduction in rates, or simply a pragmatic assessment of benefits.

The army has also found the time savings not worthwhile, and ordered its extensive fleet to avoid the Highway. Another group that is upset with the tolls are the owners of leasing and car rental companies. Because the toll billings are sent to car owners, not their users, these companies fear that their clients will evade payment.

While these tolling problems might be written off as the inevitable teething problems of a new system, other facets of the new road are more worrisome.

For example, the tendency for traffic jams at the exit of the highway when it was untolled may be indicative of a problem that was anticipated by critics: while the road will provide a convenient congestion-free corridor to the East of Tel Aviv, it leaves access into the city itself untouched unless a set of lateral connecting roads is built.

The Highway itself is budgeted at over a billion dollars, of which half has already been spent. But the lateral connecting roads necessary to provide the anticipated levels of traffic are estimated to cost nearly a billion more dollars, and they are nowhere near ready.

Since the Highway concessionaires are assured that the government will cover 80% of any shortfall from traffic projections, the pressure is large to get the roads ready in time.

In particular, the Public Works Department responsible for the construction of the lateral roads is scrambling, and sidelining other projects as the payment of Trans-Israel shortfall penalties will come out of their general budget. They are worried, since most of the lateral roads are experiencing one kind of trouble or another, whether challenges to the project tenders, or environmental opposition.

This government commitment to cover shortfall from projected traffic is one of several paradoxes in the attempt to balance public and private risks and capacities in a “public/private partnership” for highway infrastructure. In this case, the allocation of risks seems to amount to a built-in incentive to maintain high traffic volumes on the road.

The Trans-Israel contract with the Derech Eretz Highways Limited (DEC) franchise constructing the road specifies 23 million trips a year in 2002, rising to 93 million in 2027. Thus: a government guarantee to more than triple car use on the Highway over the coming decades, and for the Highway company a guaranteed and increasing revenue stream.

The financing scheme for the project, one of the largest toll road financing projects completed by the international finance community in recent years, was named “Deal of the Year” by Project Finance International Yearbook 2000.

In the event that traffic volumes remain consistently low, despite promotional campaigns and completion of lateral feeder roads, there is talk of a contingency plan: to cancel the tolls in favor of “shadow pricing.” In this scenario, tolls for drivers will be scrapped and the government will pay the DEC consortium directly, based on projected levels.

Thus, one major benefit of the highway would evaporate: directing the costs of infrastructure only to those who use it, and according to the amount of use. Under shadow tolling, all taxpayers would pay, and only drivers would benefit.

When local snipers targeted construction workers, the government decided to build a bulletproof wall to protect cars from bullets. (Last November, the government had to use considerable force to move some 400 Palestinian demonstrators who protested against their land been taken for road construction.) Further eroding potential ridership are delays in the lateral connecting roads that were planned to feed traffic onto the highway.

The Israeli government is scrambling for alternatives. One is to replace tolling with “shadow pricing”, in which the government pays the company directly for every traveler. With no tolls, more people will use the road reducing government compensation to the contractors. The government also plans to spend additional $600 million this year on new roads that will connect the Trans-Israel highway to existing roads thereby boosting the traffic on the road.

While the government is looking for ways to cut down its losses, contractors are finding it hard to raise funds for planned extensions of the road. After already spending some $500 million and with $450 million additional costs expected, contractors are seeking another $250 million to build yet another 20 km northward extension of the road, (“section 18”).

Environmentalists are concerned that section 18 will fragment the last large open natural area in the center of the country, land that may be of significant importance for the rapidly growing population in years to come. Since the proposed route goes over many streams and valleys requiring a large number of bridges to be built, construction costs for section 18 are expected to be quite high.

Local residents and representatives backed up by a land use expert say that building this road section in an underground tunnel will reduce the road’s negative impacts on the environment and not significantly exceed the costs of above ground construction. Transportation Minister, Mr. Efraim Sne, however has rejected all such proposals.

As one of the worlds smallest and densely populated countries, many fear that taken together, this massive new highway, planned to stretch to a total of 300 km from north to south, will cement Israel’s future transportation system as a car based one, increasing the loss of open spaces and induce urban sprawl. The fact that two of the main private contractors building the road are traditionally involved in housing projects may serve as an indicator of future development plans alongside the road.

The same companies are also involved in similar highway projects and retail centers construction in Central Europe.

While the government claims the road will improve access to jobs in the center of the country for those living in the periphery, relieve congestion in the already jammed Tel Aviv metropolis and improve the overall national economy, transportation experts say the road will most likely worsen existing congestion and at the same time introduce a whole new range of social and environmental problems.

An international tender for the project has also been hampered. It seems that some of the companies that expressed in interest in putting in a bid for this $400 million project were dissuaded by Arab countries threatening to boycott bidders. Only two companies will submit competitive bids; and they too have been hesitant to send representatives to the country out of fears for their safety.

There has also recently been talk of rerouting the light rail so as to avoid the Arab neighborhoods at the north end of the line. There was always debate about these lines. On the Israeli side, some on the Right were insistent that a system spanning Jewish and Arab Jerusalem was a way to unify the city, while some on the Left argued that it was wasteful to build East Jerusalem sections of the project that would soon pass over to Palestinian sovereignty as part of a peace agreement.

At the same time, while some Arab residents of these neighborhoods were concerned that the project would be an emblem of Israeli sovereignty over Arab Jerusalem, others looked forward to formal public transport services, which effectively ceased once Israeli buses feared entry into Arab areas at the beginning of the Intifadah. However, as the divide between East and West Jerusalem becomes more tense, it becomes less conceivable that orderly service can be operated across this border in “unified” Jerusalem.

Indeed, one of the destinations of a proposed future line, the Israeli industrial area of Atarot, which is surrounded by Arab neighborhoods, has been largely abandoned; suppliers and workers fear to travel there, and even insurance companies refuse coverage.

Planning in such a tense and changing setting presents a unique challenge. A Jerusalem Council member remarked in a recent interview that planners of Jerusalem’s light rail should not be getting their guidance, as they do, from planners in Germany and France, but from Belfast and Nicosia.

IMPROVING PARATRANSIT IN EAST JERUSALEM

With Israeli bus services not daring to enter Arab East Jerusalem following the outbreak of the first Intifadah, formal public transport to Arab neighborhoods has been virtually abandoned. In its place a massive system of paratransit has arisen, served by over a thousand six to eight seater minivans. These run along more or less fixed routes, but leave their origin as soon as they are full, and let off passengers on demand.

Though considered a “pirate” form of transport by the authorities, the system is remarkably effective in some ways, with extensive coverage, frequent service, and prices lower than the formal transport it replaced. At the same time, users complain of several problems. Many of the drivers lack insurance, so passengers are on their own in the case of accidents.

And since the drivers often lack training, and tend to be rough-and-ready in their driving, and vehicles not always roadworthy, these accidents are too frequent. The services also tend to be involved in drug dealing, and women complain frequently about sexual harassment by drivers.

Transport Today and Tomorrow, a local transport advocacy organization in Israel, gave a small grant to one Arab neighborhood to study the problems and come up with a set of reforms that retains the best aspect of this service, while reducing the problems. ITDP’s Yaakov Garb is assisting this effort. The Israeli Ministry of Transport is also planning their own set of reforms of the paratransit system, and the community recommendations will, in part, be a response to these.

TEL AVIV AS A TRANSIT METROPOLIS?

What makes a “transit metropolis” – a city which mass transit is a viable, respected alternative to the car? This is the question posed by Robert Cervero, a Professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley, in his latest book, The Transit Metropolis. Cervero examines 12 cities that seem to achieved this goal, and asks how they did it.

What these places have in common, he finds, is the adaptation of the urban landscape to transit, whether it is forming a high density of offices, homes, and shops around public transport nodes, finding novel ways for transit to serve more spread out form of land-use or through some combination of these strategies.

And he presents several of the factors that increase the likelihood of this kind of successful adaptation (regional institutions and governance, a vision of land-use/transport development, transit times that compete with car travel, and others).

The planned NTA light rail project for Tel Aviv: one important component of improved transit for the metropolis. The red line has a planned completion time date toward the end of the decade.

This April, Cervero will visit Israel to describe his findings and their relevance to a city sorely in need of guidance towards improved transit: Tel Aviv. The Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel, assisted by ITDP, have arranged a series of meetings with decision-makers, and public forums with planners, NGOs, and academics.

Cervero’s international studies raise a set of pointed questions for the city. Will some form of metropolitan institutional structure for transport planning get off the ground? Will transit stations of the light rail and commuter rail serve as foci of more intensive development, or will this potential be wasted, as it is around many stations today. Can the coordination between rail transit and bus feeder lines be improved?

Can the bus system itself be improved: the system as a whole has not been overhauled since the 60s, and seldom enjoys an exclusive right-of-way or priority. Will some for of transit develop to serve all the areas that the rail system will not reach for decades? Will Tel Aviv’s center stop giving priority to the entry of traffic, to make way for people and public transport?

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